We held our annual retreat last week in Orlando, Florida (Go Panthers!). While it was colder than expected, that didn’t prevent us from doing our annual planning and reflection with record high morale. Here are the headlines / key decisions we made:
We’re shortening the names of the programs. History of Science is renamed to Metascience, Exploratory Psychology is renamed to Introspection and Bottlenecks in Science and Technology is now just Bottlenecks. All 3 programs are now single words that better match the public’s understanding.
We’re planning monthly public introspection events (don’t worry, you’ll be invited!), accelerating the release of belief reporting (no, actually, actually). They’ll teach introspection in order to gather data from people on areas relevant to the institute e.g. having people report on their beliefs around radiation or AI risk.
We decided to wind down both the Strategy and Culture functions in the institute. This is the natural and expected process with functions. At first we need to dedicate concentrated time to them in order to build up the affordance. Then once that point is reached, each program contributes in the natural course of business and comes to be shared by all team members. So this happening is a celebration of having gained substantial affordances in both areas.
The retreat also provided us the opportunity to visit the Kennedy Space Center, which was extremely interesting and led to a number of conversations that we expect to continue through the quarter:
What was the rationale behind the space program? How much was about science vs. defense vs. geopolitical rivalry? This is highly relevant to the topic of responsible science.
How do science and engineering relate?
Is there a rationale for ramping up spending on space exploration? What is it?
You may be wondering given our recent fundraising struggles (feel free to donate here), why we’re spending money on a team retreat. This is a reasonable question.
The answer is that we originally started doing retreats to create a periodic venue for planning, decision making, and building culture. We chose to do them in different cities because we wanted them to be memorable and to give us the chance to search for a permanent physical location.
When money became tight, we tried a remote retreat, and it worked for planning and decision making, but was much harder to remember. At each of our retreats, we’ve made important decisions — and we want these and their origins to get embedded in institutional memory. For the ones we made in person, they’ve been easier to remember because they’re associated with different locations. (It was our Q2 2023 retreat in Phoenix, for instance, when we decided to start the AI initiative).
Plus, all things considered it wasn’t that expensive with only two members of the team needing to travel; one already lives in the Orlando area. Now in years to come, we’ll still remember that it was Q1 2024 when we streamlined the programs, ramped up events, and decided to wind down the Strategy and Culture functions.
Institutional memory is very important, and we think it’s worth paying for. Memory is essential for learning, and Leverage is a learning organization — something we're sure we’ll write more on later.
Until next week,
Oliver
p.s. Our winter fundraiser is still running, so if you want to donate but haven’t yet, you can do that here.
p.p.s Leverage just turned 13 🎉 (it was founded in January 2011)! Thank you to everyone who’s continued to follow and support us since then, we really appreciate it.